Only moments before the sun swept away the last light from my studio wall and sunk behind the buildings by the canal, I heard a sharp crack and I was in total darkness. The leg of my whittling chair broke and I found myself embracing the floor. The sudden fall triggered a powerful vertigo and I felt the room spinning wildly. I put the knife back into its sheath and lay down on my bed. I knew the vertigo was caused by a loose crystal swimming in my inner ear, and as if to celebrate its newly gained freedom, it took my brain for a waltz. I forced myself to sleep through the sway only to wake up a few minutes later in my own laughter.

I had been whittling wood throughout the autumn as an attempt to forget language and any form of critical thinking that might follow. I was not trying to manipulate the wood into any specific shape or form. It was a pure pastime and I continued whittling each log until there was nothing left but the remains. The wood chips on my floor were a byproduct of idleness, remnants of elapsed time – the debris of the unintelligible thought.

As I woke up and picked up a pen to write down the dream, all words disappeared – the whittling had paid off. So what made me laugh so abruptly in the midst of mental turmoil? Perhaps the thread separating dream from reality had just worn thin, and the dreadful vertigo was caused by something delightful slipping through the curtains into my waking hours. Why is it that words tend to disappear when one tries to delve into the trenches and memory holes of sleep? They say seeing comes before words, but what about dreams, and other vistas we behold with our eyes closed? Can such images exist without verbal thought?